(for my daughter, Mary Ann, soon fourteen)

I was eleven years old when I first had something taken from me.  My parents were still married and my two younger brothers had not yet chosen to choose differently which one they’d live with.  My dog had not yet been made lame by a falling fat man who’d taken the gift of my father’s strange rage square on the nose.  And my older sister had yet to misjudge her jump from a moving train.  No, none of these things, whether they happened or not how I’ve remembered, had happened.

I was eleven years old and in love with an old red bike.  It had a license plate that obnoxiously read Go Now Mega which I’d scratched at with a fork and so became Gnome.  I would fail my whole life to accomplish a thing greater. Before school, I’d walk the bike carefully to the end of our short drive and then seat myself on it and be still.  I would often be so perfect in my stillness that I’d forego riding it and just listen for the bus and at the last possible moment walk the bike, still carefully, back into the garage and cringe at the sound the kickstand made when lowered.  If ever school didn’t go my way I’d think of the bike, alone, in the garage and be calmed.  When I did ride the bike, I did so slowly and deliberately that I could feel my soul get a bit ahead of me.  On the best mornings, I would have for company a bed sheet of fog which made me want to fake being asleep on the couch while my mother and father milled back and forth about who would carry me to bed.

The bike had come with the rental house we moved into just shy of my tenth birthday.  The house was a three bedroom one floor with one bathroom and what felt like two kitchens.  I was too close to my hands and feet to now recall any vision that might tell me how these rooms were mapped though I’ve always held aloft the word blueprint.  I should tell you that what I previously called a garage was actually our backyard and that our backyard was really the backyard of those living in the house behind ours.  I didn’t want you to know right away who took the bike.  Who’ve no imagination.

the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

since the bee sting, my son is a staccato of worry.  in his six year old frame there is not room enough for any belief that isn’t a bumblebee waiting six years for him and him alone.  I have to enter that darkness.  even with the catcalls of real suffering.  even cradling

your daughter.

to watch the fire I make my way to a hay bale.
a certain misshapen bale I first called

scarecrow’s womb
but now

jesus hill.

this is the kind of time I have.

-

my sister believes her left eye doesn’t exist.
that it is the shadow of her right.

because of her many beliefs,
my father has placed himself
inside
a pacing
man

where he curses like a censored linguist
made to collect
a tower’s
rubble.

-

in my dreams I am charged with a notch of black tape
and the sloth
agony
of a woman’s
******.

-

I pass a finished tree with some color left in its leaves
and recall my uncle swallowing his ribbons

from the heyday of flame
     at the height of what mother called

*intake

the outhouse, and the woman in it, gone.

father’s
praying
place.

if beside it
I could see
the open empty toolbox

I knew to yank the dog homeward.
I was doing what anyway.    

in mother’s voice.  in brother’s
untucked
shirt.

messing around with our neighbor, the messiah.

ghost of snake.

an adoration
of atypical
young mother
fear.

mouse needs a toothache.

footwork
heads north.

the brother was my age and not a looker. my parents were nervous about displaying him and slicked his hair back lovingly. their hands were careful and if they touched they did so without independence.

I had other presents but I was thinking about the blood in my body and about Stephen. Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from. his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found he had no manners at the table and would have his older sister sneak up behind him and hood him with an empty feed bag. I went in with Stephen once saying his sister had called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough that they soaped her mouth in front of me then tied a string to her seemingly always loose front tooth and then tied the escaping end of the string to the **** of an open door and slammed it. because of our honesty Stephen and I were allowed to watch a movie where a white man and a savage pressed their wrists together after cutting them. the movie looked away from the cutting so we improvised. it didn’t make us any closer. I knew this for sure when on the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up without having to ****. it was my dad found him days within the week making boxes a mile gone at a pizza shop because he said his name was Billy and would work for free.

     I looked at the brother and couldn’t see it being so without my blood. I explored shyly but with faith and was heartened when I could feel in the heat of his elbows all the time he’d been born with.

i.

a hand towel
over the lid
of any
stubborn
jar-

a mother to a father
or less frequently
a father to a mother
I don’t know why this is
but either way
a gentle admittance

to couple

as if passing beneath
the singing voice
of statue…

ii.

that stage
where a baby
is all
head

that none
should endure.

baseball
a malformed hand
resting
in a hay bale

feet
so discolored     a figure
shoeless
at dusk

talk
an unbroken scribble
connects
the ears

bathroom sink the mirror’s
     belly
in it
are fish hooks

survival lives alone

by the looks of this sandwich jesus is teething

I took to my red and brother to his blue.  we were far from any head in its right mind.  I didn’t know what he thought of while sharpening his stick but I thought of two sisters fighting over a glamour shot of their mom.  homelessness experiences one man at a time and violence ties his shoe.  it came to me on a moving bike.

for Alex*

a man holds a good book
as if his hands are cuffed

turns each page
if only to relieve
this, that, wrist

when late
he may
set the book down
to light, or drop
a match

his whole life, planned out
the lit and the dropped

he may pause
here and there
to smoke
to belabor

the end of his life
where he sees himself
slipping from the cuffs
which undoubtedly
fall, then disappear

into some
nightly sound
that wakes his wife

who disoriented
is thankful
she will be on time

     her first date
with a man
not yet
apprehended

I have faith I will one day have this memory of occurring to god.

presently, I exhibit expatriate tendencies
in the shadow
of my mother.

     I entered this museum for boys
hidden in a mirror
on a time delay.

I picture my father
lighting a cigarette
in the baby dark
of his ******
awareness
while sitting
on a motorcycle
not yet surrounded
by snow

I listen for my mother
telling tales
of white owls
struggling
in outhouse
webs
and of the hole
with a bottom

I admire
the dollhouse
ghost
brushing its hair
in the lopsided
mirror
of my brother’s
loose
tooth

and I plan
to make a stick
figure
family
from no more
than eye-
lashes

you arrive early to the unpopulated town hoping you might rehearse without interruption the part you plan to audition for.  you spend most of your time in a high school locker room looking for a ball.  your one skill was recently revealed at the forefront of an evacuation spearheaded by your brother after which you were able to convince both the man in the attic and the man in the basement that they were together hallucinations seen by a mirror.  to the lord you don’t seem a day over yesterday.

the dream
the body
has
again
in which
the dream’s
body
seizes

with presence, the nerve

end’s
wake

to tell god
he swallowed
a thunderstorm
you will need
a seashell

-

I say to the boy
that before
this brain
of his
there were other

brains
the angels
thought
were bugs

-

malnutrition
can close
a wound

-

on the moon, my name is Noah

I may have already saddened

-

a sameness in the parrots we care for

-

our suicides
fight
for position

-

we twin the parable

this one:  she pushed the baby carriage and in her going made quite

the parabola     /     the baby bounced     but was dead     the baby

bobbed

-

habitually I displace:

     the ether / a god’s trenchancy

-

the academic scholar of woe whose grave I would visit

uninterrupted    

     whose stone now is a lonely letter *f

who would’ve partnered with me to abandon

my freighted usage
of lonely,

-

     of heart, of amateur eulogist

we had to **** many animals.  my father, every month, cursed a pig its lack of horns and cursed the out-of-town buying of dogs.  I took my sister once into the basement.  I blindfolded her with a black sock and told her careful there’s a pin in your hand.  mother would come from that basement pulling at her shirt and I’d nip it at the neckhole with my teeth and I could feel each nerve around them firing.  the whole of our ordeal was indeed terrible but people would talk as if they knew what they’d do or knew what they’d not.  talk as if they’d know it if they saw.  it come up for awhile and tried to live with us and I can’t say it wasn’t nice having something to put your finger on that wouldn’t thieve your sins.  I fed to it lemonheads and it seemed happy but even I admit one can overdo it on the lemonheads.  it was father made it go back in the basement because he’d tired of telling people it was his brother and pretty soon his real brother would be coming to visit.  was a visit would last the length of his brother’s life but we didn’t know it then.  the devil went its own way at some point during my uncle moving in.  we were all of us pretty clumsy and it could’ve been the noise we made.  I remember being grateful for my uncle’s heart of gold and how he wouldn’t accept our apologies saying it’s just a bunch of stuff I don’t even know I have.

I bring his shoes
in from the yard
and ask my wife

is father
here  

-

my son
is a sound
that tells me
beauty
is a sound
that tells me
nothing

-

god hounds
my perfectly
childless
and too
permissive
brother
whose first
word
was password

or, the pickpocket

voted
most likely
to be chosen
from a nudist
foster care

by christian
couples

by saying the familiar
such as

here I am, Lord

we take comfort
in the suggestion
of return-

     I so believe
and utter

here I am, Lord

but do not recall
the leave taking
my good Lord
provides

but instead
remember
being very still
for a very long time

a building went up
around me

I was very plain
for a very long time
and weighed
on the building

like an elevator
might
if broken

and in this manner
of being still and plain
I was called
to paraphrase
a certain

fey opacity

that went
I know
too far

the Ethiopian woman
shunned
for pulling rope
from between
her legs
in a manner
suggesting
the rope
has a beginning…

whose dead newborn
has the attention span
of the sadness
we register
as patience
in the guerrilla museums
of health
we are apt
to attend
on the backs
of men
who smoke
during
so they can chat

after
the cesarean.

(from 2007, slight edit)

   the boy had screamed without wanting to.  had scared the ghost his mother would not believe he had seen.  the ghost which was not a ghost but to which he had called anyway with ghost, ghost.  his mother had a sentence, and she used it.  patted his head, sighed a cigarette from her bra, then went.  the boy waited all night.  once or twice thought he saw what might be a hand, white and waving; its broomstraw fingers sweeping the many floored dark.  

     his former scream stayed the morning.  his father, he saw him put down a razor then pick it up.  his mother was blowing balloons.  tying them and ******* her finger.  

     eleven years ago, for three minutes now, the boy was born sad.  but it’s not something to be sad about because he is not very bright.  when he speaks, it is only so his parents will also speak.  they will come from any room, out of any aisle, to speak second.  they will fall over each other somehow without touching.  when this happens, the boy must remember he is not bright.  

     there is a cake, a birthday hat, and a storm.  the boy is not sure which came first, but they are here, now, at the same time.  a candle  is lit, then another.  if he slits his eyes, it seems the same candle is being lit eleven times by his one handed mother.  his father steps in when all the candles don’t go out but he is too eager and his breath seems to have in it a crying baby.  the baby goes silent.  the boy sits in the dark.  a dark so heavily settled the boy forgets he is wearing a hat.  that when he slips under the table the hat in some final nod of a scarecrow goes unaccounted and the boy thinks he is being pulled by the hand of the ghost that is not a ghost backward into some happy and useless chore.        

     under the table, taskless, the boy is humming into the cone of his hat.  for so long it is the only sound.  it takes a single frog outside to mention its locale for the boy to know he has stopped.  he puts the hat down tent atop a toy truck he cannot see.  far off, an engine idles then turns off.  it is dumbly comforting to know that in the real world there are miles between hands doing hand-like things; turning  keys, toppling hats that shouldn’t be there.  hands that curse as puppets curse; by not.

     it is by this thought of hands the boy is stilled.  he has not spoken; his parents are waiting.  are duo and separately tread their aphotic mimicry.  he can feel his father’s thumb puddle the air above his head; his mother’s elbow cotton closer the black to his eye.  his wish:  to see a ghost after seeing a ghost- the boy wonders what he has done.  what had marked the world in all its heaving inaccuracy was an exhale; now, an exhale dismissed.  

he had once cut with his thumbnail the tip of a red crayon into an empty bra he’d never seen his mother put on.  when she later dressed it became a drop of blood and she screamed and went on to birth a stone that it not be the center of a dark balloon.

not a place we can go to have my grandmother tell you again how my uncle was born with a tooth.

where slavery just a star watched and watching and **** just a rainbow bent to its work.

where babies are shaken like hollow gifts and we want people and the emptiness of people put to death.

where grey flutes billow.

where milk is in our blood and ghost letting.

where hope is ugly but don’t tell it.

where fathers disappear into the dashboards of looted trucks taking with them their once employed hands and taking with them the heat of those hands.

where disappear is not a word we lightly loft.

where envy is the work of nearby grass.

where a man moves over a woman so that she is equal and equally ransacked
of travel.

where in a field this far away one can do finders keepers to a body scraped at by others and poked.

where a pill is like a mouth but smaller. but wants a bottle. and roots at the tip of your tongue.

your brother slips in the shower, and then down the drain.  friends, with other friends, get on a plane.  your mother calls.  she is angry that you’re not angry about not being made to scale.  you say into a curtain- one piece of red cake please.  today, you will make it to the top of a baseball bat.  father will make a little promise below his arthritis.  your wife will make you happy.  she will say happy birthday- it’s a model of the city you wanted to drink in.

the ancient anxiety of dogs.

has winter
no levy
it cannot call.

bread;

the saying of bread.          

bald man
in a hair salon

religion.

but also, bravery.

our present loss, lost
to the foreclosure
of immediacy.

litany's take,
a rake.

treads your boy
to banquet-

passes my own
pulling a mouth
from a wire fence
and waves.
 
was not believed
a child

this faith.

the strength of my father
to **** his due.
the strength of yours, too.

be still.  and full.

has place
no debtor
in lull.

people **** themselves all kinds of ways. round here being Millersport, Ohio. dark and stormy is how we talk about hair. the dead before they go. my mother’s hair was dark and stormy. wasn’t a monday; her boyfriend was upright and able to hold a pan. she took a couple to the back of the head but kept walking. went to this particular barbershop that’s still there, same barber, still cuts out the dark. passed people no street to be on so they were milled about and missed her darker and missed her stormy looking up as they were. something coming and it wasn’t my mom. all kinds of ways and my mom had to use a tornado. the upper half of her body was too much for the tree but it got its mouthful. her boyfriend held that pan for a week in the same hand.

as I am now turned out you might call me on the disconnect, heck, the dialect. you might want it to be horrible putting only half of her in that tree my own mother. truth might be, tree, my whole mother, and no tornado. I might take you at your word and tell you the tornado carries nothing but my home. that my mother locked herself in the cellar on the sunniest day of the year. that I knew beforehand what the year would bring weather wise. that she lived through all the following malevolence behind those would say to her son she ain’t all there. that when she came out of the cellar it was because of a bird she’d claimed to have heard in her belly.

I read some poems badly and in bad light, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR3w2eHYE5Q



from 12.9.13


messianic allure

my brother is the safe environment I’ve created for the history of my lord. political awareness, I mean, I mean, is a darkness. my eyeglasses tell me you’ve been to see a train station. do animals wait? several impatient years later, two blindfolded mouth-breathers walk cheek to cheek in an Ohio fog that combs forward worms the length of a screen name on craigslist. I am nearly pronouncing krokodil until my tongue disappears so I can pronounce it correctly for my mother’s not frostbit ear. as for the two, they are mistaken by the disembodied poetics of local policing as the trophy nose of an odd-for-these-parts moose. any re-enactment is my father the victim of a spirited birth.

I am not one to placate beggars of description and hardly know where I lived besides.  early on I picked up a stone and my friends passed it around after I threw it.  few went braless.  *** was something of a docile raccoon cub in a half globe of ice.  fathers all were barked down from the same tree by the same poets.  in the previous I will be refusing to enter the trailer home of my ninth grade love where for all I learn her hound might still be waiting for its ******* to fall.  I will inspect only what is already true.  if in the following you do not come upon a series of blank pages just when the getting is good than my publisher was chosen too quickly and my brilliance is of less remain.  as I am well versed in parental infighting I have little vote but to edit my mother and abridge my father and say they were kids looking at an ultrasound of an empty stomach other than my mother’s.

our host fears nothing more than he fears the rodeo.  he is drunk and rubbing his plain face with a coarse sponge.  he thinks the presentation of blood on his cheekbones is proof of clown make-up.  I side with the group labeling him as harmless.  those in the disagreeable group lock themselves away in our host’s bathroom.  though the group is small, its two most vocal members have been struggling with their weight and a third is quietly pregnant.  I take it upon myself to worry about the amount of air the group has.  when the door is unsurprisingly jammed, I keep calm and remove my shoes just as what looks like rust water floods from beneath the door and carries them behind me to where the host is not dancing after all but stomping his bare feet alternately square on a hamster.  my best friend of three days wants to save the hamster but cannot believe the short length of its tail.  I try to explain that I am not helpless.  that I am steeped in tradition and was formerly employed as the guy who chews down the fingernails of professional bull riders.

     the thing about ****** is that you haven’t done it until you’ve done it with me.  
**** is a harsh word for relocation.

wheels

the night before his surgery, my boy’s body is a dark suggestion I inspect with a cell phone’s light.  his brain is tucked away.  his brain a self-assessing god that, created, has ceased to exist.  I hate that I have as all do a floating rib.  it would put me in a better place

referring to it as satan’s disabled life raft.  I have no advice for those on the operating table.  for those above-

say thumbprints.  start missing.

funerals are a form of menticide.  also, writers.  undead, I don’t mean to talk.  what I mean to do is approximately yearn.  for something nearby.  an old computer.  plugged in, cursor blinking, hell’s door.  for awareness.  priesthood.  box-cutter.  wayside.  what began as Franz Wright.  what became Lou Reed.

in most of your fields an elder woman with a polaroid camera waits for a squirrel.  

the kids have gone two or three years now without being raised.

a recent accident:  the lame girl knocked into a box of baking soda which spilled and ghosted
     a roach which disappeared into a white cane then reappeared on her hand.

less recent:  the smaller boy lifted in the grocery a bag of dog food over his head while the bigger
     pushed the cart into his back.  

the short period of time the match goes unlit by your tooth is paradise.

i.

strength
not the strength
a statue keeps.  

ii.

mother's hunger
the hunger

of marionettes.

iii.

the beggar
father hides
and the beggar
he hides

behind.

iv.

brother
don't sleep.

the paper dolls
have been cutting
your hair.

male or no, the infant is not making eyes.  before you had hands I had two desperate weeks the books of god were between.  violence is a fattened slum bumping around in the dark.  there are two ways out of you.  one is a comedian.  one is a witness.  both wear reading glasses that rest on post nose-job acne.  I am in the bathtub thinking my son will live because we are skin to skin.  my belief is a chariot flickering beside a dim horse.  a second horse is a mechanical bull with a mind of its own.  if, then I am also a flare.  vacate the young.

I slur
my saying
of moth.

I trudge
ahead of time
my dream
belongings
behind me.

god is a lantern
dropped by awe.

awe’s hand?
a sighting
none report.

when your man
sloth
of a brother
says he’s applied

for a job
in the abyss
as sentiment’s
echo-

double
your efforts.

of course, I am drawn
to the parting
story-

the red sea,
the granted custody
     of a child’s
top
half,

my thighs.

but also
I am stilled

by scarecrow, man on cross, or by

my own     stillness, my head’s

wish     to be gripped

by a crown of thorns.

if ever there was a blind man
chosen     to care     for a stork

what a story

what a story, alas

this is not the real life
where I would not dream
of abusing
you and yours.

it was not yet an idea the timid had to put the helpless all in one place.  the thirteen year person was not yet.  I wanted a water fountain for the person and I wanted it to know a female by her fingertips.  that’s what I wanted bro.  brother became toy for toying.  he was molested but said it went away.  my father was still many colored.  I couldn’t look his way without falsely moving.  I loved that like I love this:  the true simpleton sets his own house on fire to confuse the devil.  the graduate sets himself.

dad is trying to load bullets into a flashlight.  his tv show is having trouble sleeping.  mom wants us to drink the water while it’s hot.  myself I’ve heard horror stories about ******* in the baby pool.  I tell my brother having a fever is alot like giving god a *******.  sister opens the oven for a doll she thought would be taller.  we like you but not when you’re lonely.

I can’t make heads or tails of your fervor.  I can’t make body.  I put a hole in my father and through it watch my mother eat her weight in god.  I want what my siblings have.  each other, game shows, memory.  indigenous amnesia.

i.

eating is done fast and alone.  teeth
chatter
in the corner,
     a rabbit
muscles
in the mouth.  sister
visits
     naked
save the sheet
she learned
to wrap     in college

     while

haunting
tents.

ii.

dogs at the door.
father
shoeless     in the basement
negotiating
claw
&
cigarette.
 
iii.

grasshoppers press the palm, spit.
mother swats
her magazine
at hard
boys     hits

the wall, these pictures
that have
her smiling, shrug.

iv.

     sleepwalking like something brother won at the fair.  

we nudge it.  put the bread

back of the mouth.  injured

deer, slanted

mailbox.  wife

a gown
ghosting
her legs

     keeps
taut
the clothesline
from hospital
to home.

dread he came upon them. the slow father; his shadow, ill. he came upon them, those girls, punching his daughter in the stomach. had a couple years on his daughter, and weight. it was not dark. school had been out an hour. he had taken a walk. had to drop his cigarette. had to pick it up. fixed on a point beyond him; his daughter’s eyes. ***** of paper not anymore burning. first girl had one earphone in, and one come loose; a string undressed of puppet. the song that was playing, he listened. he had the time to listen. mostly his daughter read books but she would sing and he would know she was alone. he counted. there were three. it took a long a time. he paused on ‘two’, good in his mouth. the earphone girl was holding his daughter from behind. his rock cleared her braces and she choked. the two, they kept at the belly. props of delay. he ****** once and pulled the light from his lips. ashed it under the right eyeglass of the skinny one. her body made off with her soul now less a window. fat girl chewed her gum and made like she could run. he dug the house key from his pocket and placed it like a second knuckle. heard the bones of small animals, crunch of hairspray, ‘fore the key notched the back of her neck. his right hand went numb as if he’d cupped the ***** of god. fat girl good part of her landed on his daughter. he pitched her with his foot but she didn’t go easily. when a bit of day could be seen from his sentence, he received a longhand letter from his daughter and among the common she also shared how the fatty eviscerated her by email.

in your
sleep that
makes you
blush.

all of nine, ******* skates
with bucket.

I once had power
and at thirty three
could easily ****.

avoided parks, happiness, and socks

eraser pink

i.

one ground to another runs itself rock and rock in the unclosed pebbles of dirt open to aching at the wire your father fixes for free in the canceled warning of crow made gauze for blacktops poured not wholly over a woman-

she a belt buckle drunk pocked full the called back joy of a pop gun.

ii.

over glass I go with my milk bottle feet to church after church past mirrors sick and doctored.

iii.

needs hisself a dog he does the speechless boy drawn mother to his own mute breast -

so he clicks the roach of his tongue

makes a hole with the hole in his sock

makes tunnel sounds.

iv.

my aunt’s ear like a deformed thumb.
my aunt dreaming she says for two.
my aunt changing her mind, her mind
a mid-bread knife.

v.

soldiers able to turn in the throat a chicken bone straight.

vi.

for muscles: jaw down nightly the door of a stove,

jaw it up,

and salute.

vii.

tiny cups cured with sugar cubes and stilled with steam taken

from a skinned
train-born
pig, a train

of blackest
fur.

viii.

about ladders and war, about the devil-

a man stands on his hands in three feet of water. about god-

marco. marco.

ix.

the blue dolls and the gray dolls and the care with which the chosen choose cloth and after
all of it

some meat colored cloth.

x.

water knows your lips, and mine; takes our mouths

on faith.

xi.

*top teeth on the skin of an apple. top teeth mine. a test of joy, joy’s age. mama stepping on a scale holding my brother. mama putting him down, cocking her head, picking him up. asking for a towel. asking nicely be a good brother. the towel, hot from bread, sick with ants. heavy my mouth with sorry sorry. my slapped mouth, my loved love. mama’s hands back from hell. dish soap mama hands

uncut by the hair long had by my head.

prayer reminds god to grieve.

paragraphia
in its entirety
is anecdotal.

my mother, in two acts:  secretarial / secret exile.

     noumenon / father.  together,

the one that got away.

to be somewhere without a book on my person.  hard word this, hard word that, for the never arriving marble of grief.  to rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel.  to let the water from my mother’s body but not before telling her god lives in me as long as my son is outside.  to have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to.  to die well.  die punctuated.  by imagery the drowning cull from years on land spent openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.

the man began by pointing at the spots on the baby’s head and then he looked to us as if we were to answer for each.  he turned the baby’s head carefully- it might’ve been an old globe to him.  he apologized more than once for his age pocked hands.  his apologies were unsettling, each one moreso than the last.  his assistant minded none of this and sat reading an upside down newspaper while curling and uncurling her bare toes at no discernible prompt.  when the baby squealed the man went pale and dropped it and his coat opened and we saw his naked wrinkled middle turn to ash and we saw the baby scooped up by the feet of his assistant and then saw the baby fit in her mouth.  she never moved from her chair to do the scooping or the placing and we were horrified as she righted the paper and silently admonished the man for being momentarily vacant as to the whereabouts of her shoes.  he went to his fours and nosed the shoes to her feet and we said amen to the tail of his coat.  the assistant then stood and as she did so the man made swallowing noises and because we’d said amen together we were able to form a search party from which we periodically broke to *******.

a third subtle breast.
a handful of grave dirt.
the palm the coin abandons.

the man
mother irons
from the moon.

the languid hurry
of father’s care.
     his old sweater.